Petrushevskaya's real terror? Ordinary life

By MICHAEL ROBBINS

Mar 01, 2013 | 9:45 PM

(Bill Hogan, Chicago Tribune)

Barred from publishing fiction in the Soviet Union until she was 50 years old and the country was falling apart, the Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya avoids explicit political themes. It seems to have been her stories' bleakness, giving the lie to official triumphalism, that troubled the authorities.

Now in her 70s, Petrushevskaya has become Russia's best-known living writer, as Keith Gessen and Anna Summers noted in their introduction to Penguin's first collection of her stories, "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales" (2009). With the publication of "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories," it is time that someone demanded Penguin come up with better titles.

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"There Once Lived a Woman," with its deceptive subtitle, sounds like something aimed at the supernatural teen romance market. I've seen the book shelved under "horror" in stores. In fact, the disturbing, fractured tales of that collection are as far removed from ironic genre staples as Kafka is from Lovecraft.

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The story from which the title is extrapolated does not contain the titular sentence; Petrushevskaya's instincts are too fine to indulge such shock tactics. Instead, it begins "There once lived a woman who hated her neighbor — a single mother with a small child." Not as sexy, but more disconcerting, because it's located within emotional regions we recognize as our own. Petrushevskaya doesn't write about isolated acts of depravity; she writes about universal ones. What's scary about her narratives is their implication that only the thinnest film, which might rip at any time, separates us from the chaos and breakdown they describe. Gessen and Summers tell us that the author refers to what they call her "fairy tales" as "real fairy tales." Well, that's different.

And, as the new selection reveals, it was misleading of Gessen and Summers to introduce Petrushevskaya to English readers (theirs was only the third volume of her fiction to appear in the language) as a kind of Russified Poe. But Summers has compounded the problem with another inane, sensationalistic title with another wink-nudge genre classification appended.

I'm harping on these marketing decisions because it is clear from Penguin's two volumes that Petrushevskaya is an important writer who deserves to be better represented in translation. The stories in the new book have little of the macabre. They are no less frightening for that. They're mostly about desperate women whose harried lives are lubricated with vodka, sweat and tears, and whose desire for human connection is frustrated by infidelity, indifference, childbirth and want of apartment space.

"Ali-Baba" begins with an ordinarily sordid meeting in a bar, but the eponymous heroine needs to go home with Victor because she's afraid her mother will check her into rehab, "as she had done twice before." She insists on paying for the next round because

she was flush from selling another volume of her mother's edition of Alexander Blok. (Her mother didn't know it, but she now owned only four volumes of Bunin's works out of her original nine.)

It is comically appropriate that Ali-Baba should profit by stealing the work of Blok, whose verse could provide Petrushevskaya's epigraph: "Live five, ten, fifteen years more — / Nothing will change. There's no way out." Ali-Baba goes home with Victor. He pees the bed. She takes sleeping pills. Victor wakes up, calls an ambulance for her, and trots "off to work to wait for the liquor store to open."

Petrushevskaya leavens her deflationary realism with humor ("Like Penélope like Cruz," says an old woman when a younger one reluctantly puts on the awful dress she has made for her) and absurdity. That's standard. But she's a much better storyteller than her American counterparts in the seedy surreal. The deprivations of Soviet life are writ in long lines for the bathroom in communal apartments. "The housing question" hangs over every tryst, every wake, every birth. The main concern when people die or marry is who will inherit a squalid flat, who will be screwed out of a squalid flat, and who will have to share a squalid flat.

Critics compare Petrushevskaya to Chekhov and Tolstoy, but to me she resembles no one so much as the Freud of the case histories, except without the good doctor to explain their symptoms to the patients. One character's father is determined to open her "eyes to the reality of the situation, to clarify the circumstances and motives," but "none of his past explanations had done much good." His daughter ends up waiting in the cold at a tram stop for a lover who will never come. Of Frau Emmy von N., Freud writes:

She is, I imagine, not much more ready to take in this lesson than some ascetic monk from the Middle Ages who sees the hand of God and the temptation of the devil in the slightest thing that happens to him, and who is not able to imagine that the world might — even for the briefest moment, in some small corner — bear no relation to him.

In "The Story of Clarissa," Petrushevskaya's adolescent heroine "believed that every situation had something to do with her, although very few did."

For all their Soviet squalor, Petrushevskaya's stories should remind her readers of our own follies, illusions and tenderness. "The Fall" is a sort of updated version of "The Lady with the Dog," with the romance and glamour leached out, but at the end Petrushevskaya spells out what Chekhov leaves implicit: "They'll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned." There once lived billions of people whose stories ended more or less the same way.